In the aftermath of IBM’s announcement of intent to buy ILOG, it would be all too easy for us to reflect back on a conversation with ILOG’s chief executive Pierre Haren last winter at its annual user conference covering survival in the software industry.
Haren’s description of the typical life of a software vendor is that first …

We had an interesting conversation with Peter Cooper-Ellis, the guy who ran product management at BEA Systems from the time it acquired WebLogic and who's now taking on a similar role with SpringSource. Obviously, in the wake of the Oracle acquisition, it's not surprising that Cooper-Ellis jumped ship.
But in making the jump to …

While initial reviews of Bill Gates’ final Microsoft keynote in his chief architect role were rather underwhelming, partner in crime Jack Vaughan caught one interesting detail that was latched onto by Michael Meehan this week: that Microsoft’s forthcoming Microsoft SOA strategy would indeed embrace Unified Modeling Language (UML …

JavaOne provides a good barometer of the current fads hitting IT. Three years ago, Java discovered open source, two years ago it was AJAX, while last year was a non-event. But this year, the rich client’s back, baby.
In fact, this being our tenth JavaOne (which we covered remotely this year - too much darn travel), the spotlight …

In the 50 plus acquisitions that IBM has completed over the past five years, none have taken longer to close than the long-awaited Telelogic deal. Nonetheless, the bottom line of the deal is that IBM’s Rational brand will break past the software development lifecycle ghetto into the realm of developing complex products that you …

At IBM’s annual Impact SOA bash last week, software group head Steve Mills stated that the next frontier for SOA is really not a frontier at all: it’s the basic blocking and tackling of getting Enterprise Service Bus backbones to deliver the high levels of ACID reliability and fault recovery now taken for granted with OLTP …

Ever since Sun anteed up a billion in cold cash for MySQL a couple months back, we wondered when the next shoe would drop. Recently, EnterpriseDB announced that IBM was one of several venture backers to fund its third $10m round of financing.
At first glance, this appears to be IBM's response to Sun. But it isn't.
Let's drill …

Ever since the dawning of structured software development, arguments have been put forth that, if we only architected (fill in the blank) entity relationships, objects, components, processes, or services, software development organizations would magically grow more productive because they could now systematically reuse their …

JBoss seems to be undergoing some generational pains as it strives to morph from an open source products company to an enterprise open source products company. So its recent formal announcements covered the enterprise tack: something called Enterprise Acceleration that performs the basic blocking an tackling to show enterprises …

It shouldn't be a surprise as to why IT's automation needs often fall to the bottom of the stack: because most companies are not in the technology business, investments in people, processes, or technologies that are designed to improve IT only show up as expenses on the bottom line. And so while IT is the organization that is …

We've groused repeatedly about the gaps in the software development lifecycle, or more specifically, that communication and coordination have been haphazard at best when it comes to developing software.
Aside from the usual excuses of budgets, time schedules, or politics, the crux of the problem is not only the crevice that …

Opinion
Yesterday, Google's announcement of Android headlined the blogosphere, as much for what it was as for what it wasn't. For us, Google's announcement took us a few steps down memory lane, back to an era when software appliances were better known as turnkey systems.
Thanks to Moore's Law, it is taken for granted today that the …

Opinion
How often have you heard the excuse of blaming blown project budgets on unanticipated systems integration costs? For good reason, nobody wants to do customised point-to-point integrations if they can help it - it's difficult if not impossible to leverage the work.
But in one respect, such integrations contained one potentially …